Introducing: Investor Co-Occurrence

Introducing: Investor Co-Occurrence

Who are the most active investors in a space?

Have you ever wanted to know which investors are most active in a sector? Who invests with whom? How much capital is going into deals? Who invests alone vs in large syndicates?

With DataFox Investor Co-Occurence analysis, we’ve made it possible to answer these questions for any sector in seconds.

Uncover the leaders and the New Entrants

Who is investing in Bitcoin startups? You can see that Union Square Ventures & Andreessen Horowitz lead the pack (no surprise there), but you also see that relative newcomer Ribbit Capital jumps out with the second biggest nominal exposure. Want to dig deeper into their portfolio? Here it is...

So how should we interpret this chart?

Sector Deep-Dive: Internet of Things

To demonstrate the power of DataFox’s Watchlist stats combined with the Investor Co-Occurrence analysis, let’s take the example of the Internet of Things, a Watchlist containing 27 companies, including:

Which companies have raised the most capital?

And which investors have invested most frequently in this space?

Of course this is only the number of companies each investor participated in - it misses insights into the nominal $$ exposure into each, and what the investing syndicates looked like.

The graph below helps clarify the following:

J.P. Morgan has actually invested the most in this sector, through their involvement with Jawbone.

J.P. Morgan has a large participation in a round where they invested alone (you can see this from the large non-connecting hump)

JPM participated with Silver Lake and others in the other rounds they invested in Jawbone.

Portfolio Analysis

We can also zoom in on a particular investment portfolio to examine co-investment preferences. So, for example, this list of Andreessen Horowitz investments in companies with <500 employees shows that A16Z most frequently invests with SV Angel, Greylock, NEA, GV, etc, as well as doing several rounds alone.

Here’s another fascinating example: the “PayPal Mafia”. If you wanted to learn more about this incredible caldron of innovation that has spawned from this relatively small number of entrepreneurs… here are the firms that have raised the most capital out of this group:

And where did their capital come from? It’s no surprise to see Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund at the top of the list, but you also will notice that the Department of State led the largest round of all - in Tesla (which has turned out to look like a fairly shrewd allocation of capital).

So, who should be using this?

Entrepreneurs - identify the most knowledgeable VCs to approach about your capital raise

Investment bankers - figure out which investors have placed the largest existing bets in sector

Corporate development - explore acquisition opportunities in a new category & identify which VCs have portfolios worth exploring

Journalists - find thought leaders in a category and identify the firms that are most involved in a space

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About DataFox

DataFox helps businesses gain control of customer data with CRM Orchestration. Sales, marketing, and investing teams at organizations like UPS, Visa, Twilio, and InsightSquared trust DataFox for the insights they need to identify new business opportunities. DataFox is backed by Goldman Sachs, Green Visor, GV, and Slack. To learn more, visit www.datafox.com.